The Year of Disquiet.

With ironic sadness, I watch a workers' demonstration, one whose leaders ooze mock sincerity (it always seems phony to me when sincerity is evinced by collective endeavors since it is only the individual, alone in their unique ego, that is capable of feeling. This makes any teeming and rowdy group come off as little more than a mob of animated idiots). Their antics are indulged in to break the outsiders' indifference since the rest of us, living our animal lives of varying complexity, cross the stage as walk-ons who play at existing without thinking about it, devoid, as we are, of any appreciation for the magic of mystery.

One of my own favorite mysteries I was reminded of today when I read that California was soon to become, if it hadn't already, the 4'th largest economy on the globe, supplanting Germany, and taking its place behind China, the USA and Japan.

The mystery had nothing to do with California, though, but with Japan. How does an economy that has been in what economists call a depression for the span of what is rapidly approaching two generations, still rank as the THIRD largest economy on the globe, whereas, Germany, which has been the growth champion of the EU for close to that same amount of time, drop down to the fifth because of one year of sub-par growth?

Meanwhile, one of those countries, the one rivalling the US for the size of its economy, China, was also counted as one of the BRIC's, along with Brazil, Russia, and India.

If we then pirouette to the current president reanimating the God-Offal Party's theme of "American Energy Independence", when that same America is draining its "Strategic" Petroleum Reserve to do nothing more than goose the sales of gas-powered SUV's while claiming he wants at least half of new vehicles to be EV's in the next dozen years or so, the disquiet felt at the prospect of a national disaster blossoms into an anxiety that can induce a panic attack in the more vulnerable in our society.

But we are not only draining the SPR, we are draining the Permian Basin as well ... simultaneously ... and exporting its content of irreplaceable energy resources to fuel growth in our much-maligned "enemy", that same China.

Although no one on Fox, and not a soul on MNBC will ever ask the question, why is it that the only one of the world's three Petro-States (that triumvirate of oil production that together produces more than a third of the world's oil supply), that must import as many barrels of oil to run its economy as it produces, so keen on keeping its rivals' oil in the ground while doing everything possible to extract and sell to competing economies the last of its own fossil fuels?

If we take a glimpse at the oil-producing states of Iraq and Iran, whose oil-producing capacity has been knee-capped by US foreign War policy, it becomes apparent that those countries' oil production has left them with far more oil in the ground than they would otherwise have had had the US  let them drain their own reserves instead of stealing market share so we could suck our own as dry as fast as ethanol from corn is drying the Oglala Aquifer.

What, you may wonder, is their endgame? 

While this question is never asked domestically, one can be sure that Russia and Saudi Arabia, with their battened down populations, kept docile by beheadings, religious indoctrination, and authoritarian rulers, are making calculations of their own as they watch America eat its own seed corn so that Billionaires can further tighten their grip on the political process, and removable assets. 

Neither the Russians nor the Arabs have any intention of sharing the prosperity that output of their oil fields produces, with any but a chosen clique, of their populations, needing it, as they do, to sell at high profits to economies that are in desperate need, of it, none more than those economies that had been built on their own surpluses, such as Egypt, Indochina, and Venezuela, none of which can now supply their own energy needs, and so have ensconced Strongman governments to keep "the right people" (as GHWBush referred to them) in clover.

Thus, they can wait.

 It is only a matter of time before the energy hog of the globe, the USA, squanders the last of its resources, while its billionaire class sells off to ROW the Republic's last fossil fuels (much the same as Britain sold off their oil legacy, leaving them the poorest nation in Europe, yet with the most expensive form of government. Not only must they support the Keptocracy of British peers and its Royal succubae, but also its Demockracy that keeps those persons in their positions of untouchable privilege).

Even Russian citizens know the  precarious position of the US, as one can glean from conversation with ex-pats fleeing the Putin purge of a generation of Russian males. Moscow is now reminiscent of post-WW1 France, whose manhood was sent for a similar drubbing on the Maginot Line as the one the untrained Russian forces are being subject to by the Kremlin's strategy of creating a Killing Field for their excess population. Like Tsar Nicholas, Putin knows full well that the one thing a religiously-addled people can always be relied on to do is produce more babies to be reared and steered in to the maw of the iron monster of modern Warfare. 

Like Kissinger's illegal "secret" bombing of Cambodia, the plundering of the US continent is only a secret to US. The Cambodians were certainly in on the secret, as the Russians and Arabs are onto the US billionaire classes plan of rapacity. There is no "Stop the Steal" of American fossil fuel supplies, as the squabbling populace is too busy fighting for their piece of the dwindling pie to notice that their legacy is being pulled right out from underneath them while one side screams Keep it in the Ground, even as they insist on their high-energy lifestyle, while the other kowtows to clerics who blandly reassure them that, "god will provide," while they tool around in their own over-sized luxury cars dispensing useless blessings to the masses.  

Perhaps as New York and New England start rationing heating oil before winter (The Daily Mail claims stockpiles have slumped by 70%) and fears rise that families will be left in the cold, the disquiet will spread. Perhaps people will begin to ponder the wisdom of using public monies to develop a technology that is then usurped to siphon off the last of a Nation 's energy supply so as to enrich a few billionaires, who insist they are having their Freedom impinged by being asked to pay their fair share of taxes ... taxes that paid for the selfsame technology without which they would NOT be billionaires.

But for that to happen we probably would need a press that actually paid journalists instead of  hacks. And that's just not going to happen.